On the control/raising ambiguity with aspectual verbs: a structural account

Since Perlmutter (1968, 1970) argued that English aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising, the phenomenon has been argued or assumed to exist in a number of other languages, such as French (Lamiroy 1987, Ruwet 1991), German (Wurmbrand 2001), Greek (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1999), Hebrew (Landau 2003), Italian (Rizzi 1982, Burzio 1986), Japanese (Shibatani 1973, 1978, Kuno 1987, Nishigauchi 1993, Kageyama 1993, 1999, Matsumoto 1996, Koizumi 1998), and Spanish (Schroten 1986, Moore 1996), suggesting that it is common cross-linguistically. This paper takes up the issue of how the control/raising ambiguity with aspectual verbs should be accounted for. Two hypotheses are considered: the lexical ambiguity hypothesis and the structural ambiguity hypothesis. The lexical ambiguity hypothesis derives the differences between control and raising instances of aspectual verbs from their lexical specifications, i.e. selectional restrictions. The structural ambiguity hypothesis, on the other hand, claims that aspectual verbs may occupy different syntactic positions in a clause. The same aspectual verb is interpreted differently in different positions, creating the control/raising ambiguity. Perlmutter’s influential work exemplifies the lexical ambiguity hypothesis, and a brief review of some recent analyses of control and raising also reveals that they take the lexical distinction of control and raising as a starting assumption. Under such an assumption, the control/raising ambiguity can only be lexical. In this study, I present arguments for the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative